Sistina Software, the premier storage infrastructure software company delivering data-sharing solutions, today announced general availability of Global File System(TM) (GFS) version 5.1. The latest version of this powerful enterprise-class clustered file system further extends Sistina's unmatched performance, reliability and scalability with new features that help companies rapidly embrace storage area network (SAN) solutions and a new generation of blade-based computing architectures.

Sistina GFS 5.1, currently available on all major Linux distributions, lets organizations consolidate existing server and storage resources into a single management domain, linking thousands of diverse data storage repositories into a massively scalable, secure and stable SAN. The new version also adds capacity utilization quotas, server specific information within shared directories, direct kernel support for top Linux distributions from Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT) and SuSE, and application specific tuning to further enhance scalability and performance.

Customers Adopt Sistina's Technology

Sistina GFS 5.1 delivers four times the scalability of competing solutions, and Sistina currently supports expansion capabilities up to 256 nodes. With the introduction of new features specifically tuned for enterprise environments, Sistina continues to grow its customer base.

"Using Sistina GFS software, we were able to build a high-performance, scalable software development cluster using industry standard servers and shared Fibre Channel storage," said Patrick Kelsey, software engineer at InfiniCon Systems, a leader in shared I/O and clustering systems. "The result is a system that will scale in capacity to support a growing software engineering department without increasing management complexity. The GFS enabled cluster is not only easier to manage than a collection of independent servers, but is also a more cost effective solution, as we never need to retire any hardware -- we simply add more."

"Because of the volume of data I analyze in my current cosmology project, I need the shared high speed access by many processors provided by the combination of Linux and Sistina GFS," said Dr. Jim Annis, scientist, at Fermilab. "GFS has proven to be stable and reliable. I haven't had to spend my time on data management so I can spend it instead on my real goal of identifying clusters of galaxies and measuring the dark matter and dark energy content of the universe."

"Creating a virtual environment that scales beyond a single system, is more robust and reliable than a single system, and yet is as manageable as a single system, for both high performance and transactional workloads has been the goal of many suppliers since the late 1970s," said Dan Kusnetzky, vice president system software research for IDC. "Providing a unified, reliable, and scalable storage software environment is a necessary foundation for the creation of a virtual environment. The capabilities offered by Sistina's newest release of GFS are an excellent example of how far the technology has come since those early efforts."

Additional innovations in GFS 5.1 include several features that greatly ease day-to-day management of large, clustered systems and still dramatically improve the performance of these mission critical environments. These include: